Author(s): Margo Glantz; Ellen Jones (Translator)

Novel | Translated fiction | Mexico | Charco Press | Music

After her ex-husband dies unexpectedly, Nora García travels to the funeral, back to a Mexican village from her past and the art and music of their life together.

The way you hold a cello, the way light lands on a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could--a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora García as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan. Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We pingpong back and forth between Nora's life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, and just as accomplished a raconteur) and the present day (the presentness of the past), where she sits among his familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the particular mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts. In Glantz's hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, and offering us ways to express love and loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, "Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences."

"An erudite meditation on the link between mortality and the nature of art." -Publishers Weekly

"An original and highly recommended masterstroke." -Library Journal

"Reading Margo Glantz's virtuoso novel is like letting oneself go while listening to Glenn Gould interpret Mozart."" -Ilan Stavans, author of ON BORROWED WORDS: A MEMOIR OF LANGUAGE and DICTIONARY DAYS: A DEFINING PASSION

Author Biography:

Margo Glantz fused Yiddish literature, Mexican culture, and French tradition to create experimental new works of literature. Glanz graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1953 and earned a doctorate in Hispanic literature from the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Mexico to teach literature and theater history at UNAM. A prolific essayist, she is best known for her 1987 autobiography Las genealogias (The Genealogies), which blended her experiences of growing up Jewish in Catholic Mexico with her parents' immigrant experiences. She also wrote fiction and nonfiction that shed new light on the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Among her many honours, she won the Magda Donato Prize for Las genealogias and received a Rockefeller Grant (1996) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998).She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (2005), the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon (2010), and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (2011). Glantz was awarded with the 2004 National Prize for Sciences and the prestigious FIL Prize in 2010. She received Chile's Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award in 2015.

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Spanish. Her recent and forthcoming translations include Cubanthropy by Ivan de la Nuez (Seven Stories Press, 2023), The Forgery by Ave Barrera (Charco Press, 2022, co-translated with Robin Myers), and Nancy by Bruno Lloret (Two Lines Press, 2021). Her monograph, _Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas _is published by Columbia University Press (2022).